Transmitter and/or receiver (henceforth referred to generically as "transceiver") technology has evolved over the decades from the use of wires, electro-mechanical components, and machined waveguide structures to the use of coax and thick film/thin film microstrip/stripline-based circuitry. But even with this evolution, the recent proliferation of, and resulting stiff competition among, wireless communications products have led to price/performance demands on transceivers that conventional technologies find difficult to meet. A transceiver conventionally comprises a protective enclosure, an antenna, "front end" filters (e.g., a duplexer), amplifiers and other transceiver circuitry, and connectors and cabling. The most expensive components typically are the antenna, the filters, and the amplifiers. To permit obtaining these components from different sources, to permit easy interconnection of these components, and to permit easy testing and alignment, the electrical interfaces between the components have been standardized at 50.OMEGA. and are generally made via 50.OMEGA. coaxial cables and connectors. These components not only add to the cost of the transceiver, but also reduce the overall performance thereof. Moreover, the impedance conversion required to achieve 50.OMEGA. adds cost and degrades the performance of the active components of the transceiver.
High-volume manufacturing techniques have been used to reduce the costs of some conventional antennas and filters. However, these techniques do nothing to improve the performance of these components, nor do they improve the costs of low- and medium-volume components. Moreover, they do nothing to reduce the amount and the cost of cabling and connectors between the antenna and the filters. Others have sought to reduce the cost of antennas and filters at the expense of other parts of the transceiver; essentially, by shifting the cost to these other parts. One example is replacing standard front-end components with ones that have a better performance to make up for the poor performance of cheap antennas and filters, such as replacing the low-noise pre-amplifier (LNA) with one that has a lower noise figure and a higher dynamic range (i.e., higher 1-dB compression or higher third-order intercept (TOI)), or replacing the output power amplifier (PA) with one that has a higher output power. The problem with these approaches is that they merely transfer the cost to another area of the transceiver without substantially lowering the cost of the transceiver as a whole. In fact, they generally increase the complexity and the cost of the transceiver.